the soulstory

the idea

"Can you persuade people to be more sustainable with good design?" Georg asked himself this question after ordering T-shirts from the USA. He actually wanted to buy regionally and sustainably, but the designs from the American label Threadless were just too good.

That was in 2011 and Georg and I were studying in Vienna, well officially anyway. I was actually mainly making music and Georg wanted to become self-employed as a trainer for non-violent communication. After we saw the film “Plastic Planet” by Werner Boote, which showed the catastrophic effects of plastic packaging on people and the environment, we were determined to do without plastic bottles.
We only drank tap water and when we were out and about we used old wine and vodka bottles, much to the amusement of friends and strangers on the subway – but that's a whole other story.

In Georg's head, the two ideas somehow came together and he tried to persuade me: "If you could print cool things on drinking bottles, then a lot more people would use them!"

the first prototypes

At one point, the tinkerer in me was awakened. At first, I was attracted to the technical challenge: I wanted to know if we could do it. I had just lost my internship because the production company I was working for at the time had not survived the London Riots - but that's another story.

In the basement of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, I learned how to print on glass by hand using screen printing and large ceramic kilns, even though I was never officially enrolled at the university.

Within a few weeks, the first soulbottles were created in my shared room. All the designs came from friends and they were also our first customers. After just a few weeks, we were sold out and had to produce more. Our production was basically me plus a bike with a trailer. We stuck stickers on the bottles at home (often with the help of flatmates or whoever else was there) and then took our bikes to the university, where the ovens were used to fire the color. Picking them up was more strenuous, though, as we had to ride uphill with a full trailer. At some point, my room was so full of soulbottles drinking bottles that every time a train or car drove past the window, my whole room rattled.
Georg and I spent the next few months building up soulbottles. We did (almost) everything ourselves - from the website to the accounting. It was a bit chaotic. But demand kept growing and every soulbottle sold told the story of a more sustainable and beautiful world.

founding and first series

In August 2012, after nine months of excitement and ups and downs, the angel investment came from the entrepreneur Bernardo Saorin and the official founding of the GmbH. Bernardo had been looking for a plastic-free drinking bottle for his children and discovered us. With the help of his investment and a successful crowdfunding campaign, the first machine-produced soulbottles rolled off the production line in 2013...